An Anti-corruption Assessment of the Legislation – a Report on the Law on Expropriation

One of the basic conclusions that stem from the analysis of the Law on Expropriation is the fact that the legislator has intended to protect the state instead of the owners of the private property that is being expropriated.

The Law bestows discretionary powers to the authorities that implement the expropriation, which in turn paves the way for potential misuse of influence and corruption.

The compensation in the expropriation process remains to be the greatest weaknesses in the implementation of this Law. Despite the fact that the Constitution and the Law are allegedly grounded on the premise of the real market value, in practice this is missing and the subject of most of the court disputes is the value of the compensation and the extremely undervalued prices that the expropriation authorities offer. The legal gaps in the misdemeanor provisions, on the other hand, leave room for misuse in the procedures themselves and provide no mechanisms for punishment of poor implementation of the expropriation procedures.

Read the analysis here.